


Crash

by Evidence



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, The Problem of Susan, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 04:04:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1674023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evidence/pseuds/Evidence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aslan had told her, once, that she would never return to Narnia again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crash

**Author's Note:**

> Another contribution to the wide, often-depressing world of 'Susan Fic'.

 

 

_Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia._

 

Aslan had told her, once, that she would never return to Narnia again.

 

Susan stands upon the grass beside the gravestones. They’re simple markers; short, and lined all in a row, with names and dates and inadequate sentiments carved in carefully at the bottom. Words like _beloved_ and _dearly missed_ scrawled across smooth, pale stone. There is grass growing beneath her feet. It’s short, and pokes against the black leather of her shoes. A blade of it is caught against the seam of her nylon stockings. It’s sticky with morning dew, and she does not see it, her eyes instead cast towards the covered swells of earth before her. There are too many for her to decide where to look. Her mother, her father. Peter. Edmund. Lucy. It doesn’t _quite_ make sense, except that it does, in the way that truly terrible things always and never do.

 

_“I am known by another name in your world,”_ Aslan had told her. _“You must seek me there, and by that name. You are old enough now. It is time that you let go, and made a place for yourself in your own world.”_

 

She had thought that it had hurt, then. It _had_ hurt. In point of fact it had been one of the greatest pains in her life, to stand there and be banished, however kindly. However gently. She was not – she was never – like Lucy, always seeking new things, always longing for more adventures. It had been hard for her to become a queen. Once she had, then, it had been hard for her to become a child again. It had been hard to return to Narnia to find that all she had known, all she had helped to build, was left in ruin; and it had been hard to realize that she would never go back again, once she left that last time. But in a way it had almost been a relief, as well. Because with Narnia she was never certain. It never did to become too complacent or comfortable, to relax too heartily there, because one never knew when they would be plucked up and swept into a storm again. _It is time that you go, and make a place for yourself in your own world._

 

Sound advice, Susan had thought. If she could not ever have Narnia again, then what was the point in lingering on it? What was the point in driving herself mad with memories of a place she could never return to? She had expected Peter, at least, to understand. He had been there – had stood beside her, and heard the same words. _Cruel_ , she had thought it, when Lucy would come barreling in with Aslan’s name upon her lips, and _remember when we danced with the dryads_ and _remember when Caspian found your horn_ and _remember, remember, remember_. Remember what you have lost. And oh, it had seemed such a crushing loss, and she had floundered, had snapped and given in to temper and brought out the only weapons she knew could defend herself from the onslaught.

 

_“Are you still going on about that silly children’s game, Lu?”_

 

_“W…what…?”_

 

She had been cruel in her turn, because she _knew_. She knew it wasn’t just a silly children’s game. She had been a queen, once, in golden lands where her hair grew long, and the air was sweet, and great men vied for her attentions. Where she had known no better friends than her own brothers and sister, and her words had carried weight. It was impossible to forget, even when she tried, but with each passing day it became easier to lie. And there was a sort of hard satisfaction in the lie. Nothing frustrated them more, stymied them more, than her insistent denials. She would laugh, and change the subject, and jangle all the heavy realities of their world in front of them as real and solid and _there_. They had no more banquets in Narnia, no more feasts or revels with centaurs and fairies; but there were still parties to be found. Still sweet fruit to be eaten, and interesting people to be met. _Make a place for yourself in your own world._

 

It had been bitterness, she realizes. Ashes in her mouth and frost creeping over her heart. _Always a queen of Narnia indeed_.

 

But that loss is a loss she longs to have stand as the worst of hers now.

 

_Why banish us,_ she wonders, _when you were just going to steal them away again in a few years? Why take our parents, too? Why?_

 

Her heart clenches in her chest, cold and hard, and she can taste them at the back of her throat now. The ashes. They had lingered on the air around the train crash, had clung to her long after she left again.

 

_Why leave me all alone?_

 

_I was making my place in this world! I was doing what you told me to do! How could I live in this world and always keep one foot in the other? How was I supposed to move on when nothing here was ever so bright, ever so easy, ever so lovely as anything there?_

 

Eve, Susan thinks, was cast from the garden for tasting of forbidden fruit. Undoubtedly, it must have been hard for her. To shoulder such a change. To endure the loss of paradise. But at least Eve knew her crime. She may have been tempted by the serpent, but she still gave in to temptation. Edmund may have been beguiled by the witch, but he still knew where he had gone astray. As her shoes crush the dewy blades of cemetery grass, Susan marvels at this loss, at this depth of pain, at this unerring reality that she is – she _must_ – be enduring punishment; but she does not know why. Perhaps denial was her crime. Perhaps bitterness. Perhaps it was merely that _he_ had always loved her least of all the four, and had seen no folly in collecting all of the others without her.

 

Or perhaps, even more frighteningly, they are simply gone. Perhaps it is no crime, no punishment, no nothing at all, and the only truth of it is that her family has died in a terrible accident. That even kings and queens of Narnia cannot withstand the crushing blow of metal impacting against their bodies.

 

That the lion was a liar, and there is no Aslan of any name _here_ , in this grey and heavy world.

 

Perhaps it is not about Susan at all; perhaps it is very explicitly about all of them _but_ Susan.

 

She wishes very dearly that Lucy would run up to her and insist upon talking about things she cannot bear to remember. She wishes that wherever they had gone, however uncomfortable or awful or strange the place, that she had gone with them. That is the thought that does it. It brings her down, sucking all of the air from her lungs, whisking all of the strength from her legs. Because _Peter_ , and _Edmund_ , and _Lucy_. Because _Mother_ and _Father_. Because there is no one there to fall down beside her as she weeps, her fingers digging grooves into the earth, her tears staining hugely against her sleeves and her vision all a blur. Because she has lost it all, now, and she does not know if there is any further to fall; wonders, almost obscenely, if she will keep going down and down from here on out. What more does she have to lose? Material things, she supposes. Her place to sleep, the money she has to buy food, the clothes on her back. She’s so close to rock bottom that it seems almost a shame not to go and see it now.

 

A laugh escapes her throat. It is not the happy, freeing laugh of Queen Susan the Gentle. It not the hollow, high-toned laugh of Sue Pevensie, either. It is brittle, and mirthless, and half-mad with grief.

 

_Give them back,_ she thinks, irrationally. _Give them back! They’re supposed to be here, with me! They’re supposed to stay here and **live** in this world, like **I** live in this world!_

 

“Give them back,” she whispers raggedly.

 

Of course, there is no reply.


End file.
